The biggest cost of this giant civilizational LARP is that people aren’t given much space to actually go build models, learn to the point that they know what they’re doing, etc.
I think there’s another, bigger reason why this happens. Workmanship and incremental progress are predictable. In many fields (academic research comes to mind), in an attempt to optimize productivity and capture in a bottle the lightning of genius, we’ve built edifices of complex metrics that we then try to maximise in tight feedback loops. But if you are being judged by those metrics and need to deliver results on a precise schedule, it’s usually a lot more reliable to just try and do repeatable things that will produce a steady trickle of small results than to sit down studying models of things hoping this will lead you to a greater intuition down the line. After long enough, yeah, people start feeling like that is what real expertise looks like. This is absolutely a problem and IMO makes worse the issue of stagnation in some fields of research and the replicability crisis.
I think there’s another, bigger reason why this happens. Workmanship and incremental progress are predictable. In many fields (academic research comes to mind), in an attempt to optimize productivity and capture in a bottle the lightning of genius, we’ve built edifices of complex metrics that we then try to maximise in tight feedback loops. But if you are being judged by those metrics and need to deliver results on a precise schedule, it’s usually a lot more reliable to just try and do repeatable things that will produce a steady trickle of small results than to sit down studying models of things hoping this will lead you to a greater intuition down the line. After long enough, yeah, people start feeling like that is what real expertise looks like. This is absolutely a problem and IMO makes worse the issue of stagnation in some fields of research and the replicability crisis.